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L.L.Bean overhauls its backup process

The outdoor apparel and equipment outfitter moves IBM Tivoli Storage Manager from its mainframe to Linux servers, and adds SATA disk to its backup environment. Sandy Rideout, a storage engineer at L.L.Bean Inc. in Freeport, ME, had become increasingly unhappy with the outdoor gear retailer's storage backup and restore environment. The system was built around IBM Corp.'s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and ran on the mainframe under z/OS, but was backing up more than 240 open-systems nodes--Windows, AIX, Linux, Sun and NetWare. Rideout had long suspected mainframe constraints were slowing down the backup, and things came to a head in the summer of 2005. "We had instances of excruciating, long restores," she recalls. "In some cases, not all the data was recovered." Open-systems backups were a particular concern. The problems propelled L.L.Bean's IT group into a three-phase initiative to overhaul its entire approach to mainframe and open-systems backup and recovery. The project took a team of four storage and systems engineers (with ...

Configuring the number of ports on storage arrays and switches shouldn't be a guessing game that results in an excess of ports and a big dent in your budget. To properly size a switch or storage array, you need to analyze the average and peak bandwidth requirements of each device. Monitoring current utilization rates will help you determine effective bandwidth requirements.

Serial-attached SCSI and iSCSI host bus adapters (HBAs) represent the latest in server-to-storage connectivity technologies. Tailored to specifically address the needs of two emerging storage protocols, these new HBAs can ensure that performance isn't sacrificed when one of these alternatives to Fibre Channel storage is deployed.

Database archiving is critical to the long-term management of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. Archiving can shorten backup windows, speed recoveries and improve the database's overall performance. But effective archiving means carefully selecting the data to be removed from the production application and moved to secondary storage, and ensuring that it remains available and adequately protected.

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Evolutionary changes in the storage world have opened the door to scores of smaller companies. Some of these startups have seized the opportunity, taking advantage of the current market dynamics. Good for them; but it's even better for you, with more choice and innovation than we've seen in a long time.

Vendors will tell you how beautifully parity-based RAID works in their storage subsystems, making it almost unnecessary to use any type of striped/mirrored RAID protection. But if you don't match the workload profile of the application to how storage is provisioned in the array, you could wind up with a poorly balanced system.